Music Week's round-up of the latest album reissues and catalogue releases. This week we take a look at The Best Soul Album, The Best R&B Album, Phil Ochs and Charlie Rich...
Various
100 Hits: The Best Soul Album (Demon Music Group/Sony DMGN 100209)/100 Hits: The Best R&B Album (DMGN 100211)
With around 200 titles released since its inception in 2007, Demon's 100 Hits series is a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut - and the two latest additions to its range will doubtless add considerably to its total sales, which are approaching 8m. Smartly packaged in space-saving digipacks, each 5 CD set contains the prerequisite century of songs, and is priced to sell for well under £10. The Best Soul Album is very much a vintage set, with major hits like Lady Marmalade by LaBelle and Family Affair by Sly & The Family Stone rubbing shoulders with slightly less well-known but equally valid choices like The Sweetest Pain by Dexter Wansel and Billy Paul's extraordinary take on Paul McCartney's Let 'Em In, as featured in the current Postcode Lottery TV advert. The Best R&B Album spans a much wider timeframe and is more eclectic, accommodating predictable choices like No Scrubs by TLC and Breathe Again by Toni Braxton but also finding room for less extreme hip-hop and dance hybrids like Rita Ora & Tinie Tempah's R.I.P, Cypress Hill's Insane In The Brain and Alison Limerick's Where Love Lives not to mention the pure pop of JLS' Everybody In Love. There's nothing too extreme, but Dead Prez's Hip Hop and Eamon's potty-mouthed but melodic F**k It (I Don't Want You Back) are on the outer limits.
Phil Ochs
All The News That's Fit To Sing (Man In The Moon MITMCD 28)/I Ain't Marching Anymore (MITMCD 27)
These are no frills reissues of the first two of the eight albums released by troubled protest singer Phil Ochs prior to his self-inflicted death at the age of 35 in 1976. All The News That's Fit To Sing, from 1964, and the following year's I Ain't Marching Anymore were his only catalogue releases for Elektra, and failed to secure chart status. However, interest in Ochs, particularly in the early phases of his career, has grown over the years, and their re-release will be welcomed by many. An uncompromising singer/songwriter in the folk/rock mode, Ochs was influenced by the likes of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Buddy Holly, and made fewer compromises than Bob Dylan, whose rise to fame was more smooth and sustained. All The News That's Fit To Print is well-named - Ochs described himself at this point as a singing journalist and a lot of the current affairs and social issues that exercised his mind were ripped from the pages of Newsweek, though the album's title is a variant on the New York Times' motto, All The News That's Fit To Print. Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the sinking of a nuclear-powered submarine are all grist to Ochs mill. Arguably, the better of the two albums, I Ain't Marching Anymore is similarly political, addressing all of the issues of the day, but injecting humour into Draft Dodger's Blues, a haunting melody into Celia, and the spirit of Woody Guthrie into much else. Worth investigating.
Charlie Rich
Too Many Teardrops - The Complete Groove & RCA Recordings (Ace CDTOP 21509).
Before he became a major country star in the early 1970s, 'silver fox' Charlie Rich tried his hand at several other musical idioms, some of which are evident on this excellent new Ace set, which anthologises his entire output between June 1963 and February 1965, during which he released three albums and a number of singles for the Groove and RCA labels. Gathered together in one place for the first time, several of the 40 tracks here are making their CD debuts and one - the serviceable but unspectacular One More Mountain, One More River - is released for the first time. In his later career, Rich rarely garnered credits as a writer, so it is a pleasure to note that he wrote 15 of the tracks here (and his wife another one), most of which are of a very high quality. Rich's versatile voice is equally at home with country, jazz, blues and easy listening, all of which are covered here. Sometimes straying a little too close to Elvis, he nevertheless acquits himself very well, with standout tracks including the soulful Are You Still My Baby, a lively reworking of the old jazz/spiritual standard Ol' Man River and the beautiful string-swathed She Called Me Baby, perhaps the best example of his country calling here.
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